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Keep your ID safe from scammers this tax season

It is that time of the year again when you are all abuzz worrying about your taxes. From February, until mid-April, what starts out as a nagging concern in the back of your head, reaches a crescendo day by day.

You have a lot of papers that you need to organize. Increasingly a lot of the tax-related documents are being provided to you online on secure websites (you are checking that the provider is using a secure website to serve you their documents, aren’t you?). But then you need to get these to your tax accountant, and so you perhaps do it the old-fashioned way and print out all the documents that are online and carry them over to your tax accountant. Increasingly tax accountants are becoming sophisticated and are allowing you to send them email. So you start emailing documents to your accountant. Thus you create one of the largest loopholes in your overall secure handling of documents.

Emailing is a very insecure way of sending documents to others. You could accidentally send the documents to the wrong email address. It is very easy to make a typo when typing in the recipient’s email address. Your email account could get hacked by bad actors looking to steal your ID (this is way more common that you think). Read this Wikipedia article on all the ways your email account can get hacked.

You can make emailing more secure by encrypting the documents you want to email using a separate encryption program and sharing the password to decrypt the document with your tax accountant over the phone. That way the document within your email account and the recipient’s email account is always encrypted and it’s only when the recipient downloads the document that it is decrypted for viewing.

WireDoc provides the same level of security as the above with a number of additional features. WireDoc works in the browser and you don’t need any additional software. The documents you want to share with someone are encrypted in the browser and stored securely online and an email notification is sent to the recipient to download the document. Whenever they want to, the recipient can choose to download the document using the link provided in their email and at which time they can decrypt the document and save it in their WireDoc account or on their computer.

While on WireDoc, all your documents are always stored encrypted. With the mechanism we use for the whole process, no one at WireDoc can look at your documents either.